Google Web Preview Analytics

[Andy Langton]

I noticed this one yesterday from a Google IP:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview Analytics) Chrome/27.0.1453 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

As far as I can tell, this is the same UA as was used for Google Instant Previews [googleblog.blogspot.co.uk] (launched 2010, discontinued 2013-ish) which showed a screenshot of a result direct from SERPs. Wonder if they are trying something like this again, or whether someone has access to an ancient interface?

Earlier thread has a similar UA, but no "analytics" on the end:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[keyplyr]

Did the hit come from a Googlebot "crawl" IP?

[Andy Langton]

Yes, with valid reverse DNS. I also saw another hit today with a slightly different UA - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/27.0.1453 Safari/537.36 from a google-proxy-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.google.com IP.

Could be a coincidence, or perhaps a new test of previews.

[keyplyr]

The proxy ranges are tricky. I filter by UA. Some (like the Google Image Proxy that grabs my images for Google+) are welcome, but many are apps by developers which I categorically block until I can get an idea of what it is.

[blend27]

Andy, I haven't seen "Analytics", but could it be triggered by looking at the preview of what pages are linking to particular URL, linking page in GWT?

As for me, No "Preview", no CHACHE here, categorically, name that finger approach, been like that since the 2010 thread.